[Cracked Sidewalks]Which missing MU Player Could Have Made Us 6-0?

[bamamarquettefan]

Of course.  That's why these analyses projecting a player's impact on a different team have limited value.  In a sport like baseball that is a series of isolated events, individual performance transfers into a different situation fairly well.  In a more free flowing game like basketball where a given player's contribution is highly dependent on other variables such as teammates, coaching and opposing matchups, you can't accurately quantify that player's contribution in another setting (not to mention the impact that player has on other players' contributions).  It is interesting (painful?) to think about what might have been if we'd had Newbill or kept Shayok, but it is very difficult to quantify their impact in specific situations.

The style of player can certainly play to a players strength or weakness, but overall if you flip through players who have transferred (all 50,000+ players since 2003) you see a lot of consistency when a player transfers.  CJ McCollum adds a tremendous 7 points per game while at Duquesne and stays almost as high when he transfers to Arizona.  KT Harrell, who seems to have tons of talent, is just worth just a point or two at UVa, and then transfers to Auburn and is worth the same his junior year there, though he did improve a bit. Because we measure level of oppositions, it is the best measure of how likely a player is to do after changing teams.

More important our NBA adjustments coupled with these are how we were able to tell NBA teams that one Jimmy Butler was actually the much bigger prospect than Lazar before he was on any mock drafts, how we picked Otto Porter as Big East player of the year after he had averaged SINGLE digits the previous year, spotted Napier two years before anyone else did, etc. It's a way to watch all 4000 players at a time and take a look at the ones noone has heard off.

Besides all that, the Fox Sports interview was a great chance for coverage of how this southern boy came to love Milwaukee and Marquette.

[Dawson Rental]

What about the Toddler?

You mean Zaire???

[Class71]

Any analysis on what Deonte Burton would have been projected to add?

Turnovers, turnovers and chucking with great athletic skill. All the talent in the world but is he coachable?

[MerrittsMustache]

You mean Zaire???

This made me chuckle. Well done.

[MerrittsMustache]

I know you are kidding, but the EXACT reason Value Add was invented - this insane perception that a player IMPROVES a team as much as he scores - even while he is taking points away by missed shots, turnovers, allowing opponents to score etc.

As stated above, Jones is worth a tiny 0.91 points per game. Ferguson is worth even less -  0.47. Neither would add a single win to Marquette even by giving us one extra body on a short bench.

I'm a numbers geek and I appreciate the work you do and typically find it very interesting. However, in this case, I just can't read too much into the numbers put up by a player at a different school in a different system with a different role playing against different competition with different teammates. There are just too many variables.

[MuMark]

I had heard that Wojo wanted to keep Shayok more than any of the other recruits. Didn't see it at the time but it looks like Wojo knows!

We definitely missed on a stud when we let Newbill go. Couldn't have possibly seen it at the time, but he might have been able to save last year's season.

Newbill can't be a stud...he wasn't a top 100 high school player!